Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Protect the Free Market from those Anarchists!

Whew! Here's Robert Anton Wilson trying to get people into a state of
generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God .... but agnosticism about the everything; even the free market!

"“Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage," Celine went on. "In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that's all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us," he concluded, strongly emphasizing the last clause, staring at Drake, not at the professor.” ― Robert Anton Wilson, The Golden Apple

2 comments:

I was a coordinator for a Local Employment and Trading Scheme (LETS) for my rural region. What I noticed was that people weren't that keen to engage in trade where the terms of trade were equal. That is, where each person received the same number of points for each hour they worked.

Some tried to charge a higher rate than others. Then resentment came into it. "Why is Sue's labour worth more than mine!" A group of individuals thought it was entirely unfair to pay the coordinator (although it was in points redeemable only). They regarded a trading system as a community charity, and declared that they were prepared to do it for nothing. I was more than keen to give them the opportunity, but their efforts on the job petered out completely after a few weeks.

I was a coordinator for a Local Employment and Trading Scheme (LETS) for my rural region. What I noticed was that people weren't that keen to engage in trade where the terms of trade were equal. That is, where each person received the same number of points for each hour they worked.

Some tried to charge a higher rate than others. Then resentment came into it. "Why is Sue's labour worth more than mine!" A group of individuals thought it was entirely unfair to pay the coordinator (although it was in points redeemable only). They regarded a trading system as a community charity, and declared that they were prepared to do it for nothing. I was more than keen to give them the opportunity, but their efforts on the job petered out completely after a few weeks.